Conventionally, with the purpose of protecting the floor surface and improving the beauty of the same, a floor polishing agent (hereafter, also called as a floor polish) has been applied to the floor surface of buildings so that performances such as luster and heel mark resistance properties can be imparted to the floor surface. The above floor polishing agents fall roughly into the aqueous floor polishing agents or the oily floor polishing agents. Oily floor polishing agents, of which components are mostly petroleum solvents, have problems with flammability and air ventilation both in the working environment and at the time of storage. Therefore, recently aqueous polishing agents have become mainstream as a floor polishing. However, aqueous floor polishing agents had disadvantages in that wetting characteristic is poor due to high surface tension, and also leveling properties are poor due to causing non-uniformity on the dried film. These poor leveling properties due to the non-uniformity of dried film negatively affect durability, beauty of appearance, flexibility and adhesive properties to floor materials or the like. In order to improve these problems, plasticizers and leveling agents have been usually added, and in particular tributoxyethyl phosphate has been mainly used as a plasticizer-cum-leveling agent.
However, there is a fear that the tributoxyethyl phosphate containing elemental phosphorus, leaks in the wastewater or negatively affects the indoor environment. Therefore, an alternative material to tributoxyethyl phosphate is required.
As examples of plasticizers and leveling agents instead of tributoxyethyl phosphate, various compounds such as compositions containing polyalkoxylate of straight chain aliphatic alcohol (Patent document 1), polyethoxylated secondary alcohol (Patent documents 2 and 3), an adipic acid ester compound (Patent document 4), polyoxyethylene alkyl ether and 2,2,4-trimethyl 1,3-pentanediol monoisobutylate (Patent documents 5 and 6), citric acid alkyl ester (Patent document 7), an alkylene oxide addition product of aliphatic alcohol (Patent document 8), benzoate ester (Patent document 9) and ester of hydroxy carboxylic acid with glycol (Patent document 10) have already been reported.